[@OKFNau] Central ckan or other repository for Aus data?

Thu Dec 11 06:40:47 UTC 2014

I think a combination of curation and some automatic search/filtering is
the way to go here.

For example, on the "bicycle" theme, let's talk specifically about bicycle
volume data. There are a few sources of this:
- Bicycle Victoria does an annual survey at a few hundred locations.
- VicRoads has automatic sensors in various locations
- Some councils probably have some of their own sensors on roads, and there
are definitely sensors on some tourism-related bike paths like rail trails.
- Strava is an incredible resource of user-contributed data, with its own
biases etc. It's not open data but is relevant.
- Stats from the Melbourne Bike Share scheme are "bike volume data" in a
weaker sense.
- There are probably commuter surveys from councils, asking how people get
to work
- VicHealth would have its own surveys asking people how often they ride to
work
- And for that matter, Bike Vic has "ride to work" day data, separate from
its annual bike count.
- And there are probably various datasets generated by researchers
surveying people or using their

Imagine the list I've just written, but with links to datasets, and with a
few flags like "2013" and "CSV". I think this would be an awesome resource
for anyone interested in this kind of data. It's hard to see how you could
get to something this well organised purely through searching, tags etc,
unless someone is stepping in to add the right tags, tweak dataset
descriptions etc.

The closest thing I can think of as a model would be the Australian
Parliamentary Library
<http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/Browse_by_Topic>.
For example:
http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp1314/QG/Asylum

Or...actually maybe more like Wikimedia Commons:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bicycle

There, each page is a curated selection of highlights from a bigger
category, with links to subcategories (eg,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Urban_cycling - whoa, NSFW if
you scroll down) - hence a combination of curated and non-curated content.

The implementation in GovPond could be as simple as:
- a page ("bicycle") with some static HTML/markdown/wikitext for the
curated content
- then, results of a hand-crafted query (perhaps more sophisticated than
just the word "bicycle")

Steve

On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 1:52 PM, Alex (Maxious) Sadleir <maxious at gmail.com>
wrote:

> +1 for bolting search based curation on to GovPond. Is it on Github? ;)
>
> I downloaded the GovPond JSON and it looks like what you need to store
> metadata in a common way; CKAN scented JSON but references back to
> original portals as first class elements.
> There's these data sources like OSM/Strava outside of the government
> open data portals that you would want to highlight in the context of a
> particular theme that would need to be "tipped in" for that theme.
>
> I would note with the data.gov.au Metadata Mapping
> https://data.gov.au/dataset/data-gov-au-metadata-and-other-schemas and
> other common metadata standards around, there's plenty of tagging of
> temporal/spatial coverage in various .au data portals (so 19th Century
> theme or Sydney theme possible)
>
> On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 12:31 PM, Keith Moss <keithamoss at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Thanks for the tip, Catherine. I do rather like the approach ANDS has
> taken
> > with also having sub-categories (Featured, National, International)
> within
> > each theme.
> >
> > As as a matter of interest - what platform is Research Data Australia
> > running on?
> >
> > @Steve
> > Your idea around tying it into GovPond got me thinking. Maybe the "smart
> > search rules" part could just be using the existing tags applied to data
> to
> > semi-automatically generate themes like bicycle.govpond.org?
> >
> > So throw in a step at the start...
> >
> > 0. Some manual work on our end saying that tag1, tag2, ..., tagN are all
> > part of a given theme.
> >
> > :)
> >
> > On Thu Dec 11 2014 at 8:19:26 AM Catherine Brady
> > <catherine.brady at ands.org.au> wrote:
> >>
> >> Steve, Keith,
> >> The Research Data Australia portal has implemented theme-based
> collections
> >> precisely for that reason - to bring together similar subject-based
> >> resources across the many, and diverse, metadata/data providers who
> >> contribute to Research Data Australia. We have started with nine
> themes, but
> >> plan to expand our offerings over time. See:
> >> https://researchdata.ands.org.au/themes.
> >> Catherine
> >>
> >>
> >> Catherine Brady
> >> Collection Development Librarian
> >> Australian National Data Service
> >> ph: +61 2 6125 0578
> >> em: catherine.brady at ands.org.au
> >> web: http://ands.org.au
> >> On 7 December 2014 at 01:37, Keith Moss <keithamoss at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> I love the idea of themed data portals, Steve.
> >>>
> >>> For your third point: Does the federation functionality in CKAN permit
> >>> anything like this? And if not, can we build it in? (Perhaps an Alex
> >>> question...)
> >>>
> >>> It would be nice to tie it all in with the data publishing processes
> >>> government are using for their official portals without the need to
> copy
> >>> data around the place.
> >>>
> >>> Cheers,
> >>>
> >>> Keith
> >>>
> >>>
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